Halfway through Diva, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 thriller about a young postman caught in a gangster plot after secretly recording a beautiful Black American opera soprano, the singer has a tough conversation with her agent. “Let them do their record, I will never sign,” she says, when she’s made aware that Taiwanese bootleggers are blackmailing her after stealing a copy of her stunning performance. Her agent snaps back: “It’s not a question of pride. So you either continue to follow your diva whims, or you act as a responsible adult and make this record.” Her situation—subject to exploitative forces beyond one’s control, the music ripped from her grasp by people clamoring for a taste of her voice—might make Veeze nod solemnly in sympathy. The Detroit rapper’s career has similarly seemed like a casualty in the battle for creative agency—one that at times he barely seems interested in fighting.
Nonstop leaks have colored Veeze’s run since Ganger, the critically acclaimed 2023 debut that kept his COVID-era momentum going. Songs stripped from the Detroit rapper’s IG Lives or hard drive constantly add to the brackish mix of outstanding features (“Right Key,” “Half Sleep”) and singles (“L.O.A.T,” “One of Them Ones”), creating a strange dual effect—building excitement for the oft-promised Worst Tape while simultaneously pushing it farther down the road. The obsessive clamoring for unreleased music gave tracks like the Rylo Rodriguez collab “Everlasting Bass” a mythical allure, while preempting their eventual official release. Veeze, though, seems at peace with leak culture: “If your music don’t get leaked, you ain’t fire,” he said last year.
On the surface, Y’all Won, the first project from Veeze in close to two years, arrives as a concession. Cobbled together as a mixtape from a collection of leaks—allegedly because Veeze was holding onto a payload of Carti tracks—the tape hums along with a looseness that could only come from not being edited to death. The unrefined nature keeps some ideas from feeling fleshed out, but Veeze’s personality and precise execution smooth over the rough edges. Fusing magnetic spontaneity and attention to detail, Y’all Won displays the consistency at the center of Veeze’s output, even when his hand is forced.
Veeze’s signature rapping voice, which sounds like his vocal cords are coated in phlegm and cough syrup, is increasingly versatile, despite the sometimes half-asleep delivery. It can occasionally be overkill when leans back on his default mode, like on “Old Shit,” where he truly sounds like he’s just rolled out of bed. But on “Wrong Place, Wrong time,” he nimbly moves through a wall of punchlines, pulling levers to switch up his cadence and avoid being drowned out by the daunting Bass Kids beat, which feels like a Luigi’s Mansion soundtrack with a rocket strapped to its back. “Malice in the Palace” is a rare moment where his voice comes through in high definition over the bass-boosted Taurus production, and it gives his comedic musings considerably more weight: “It’s like 8 in the morning, I’m thinkin’ bout sippin’ me an eight/I’m cuddlin’ Ben Franklin, all my bitches think I’m—,” he raps at the end of the first verse, before cutting himself off and mumbling into the production’s negative space.
There’s an overriding feeling that Veeze is trying to make himself or his homies laugh, no matter how morbid things may get. He’s so grimy that he compares himself to murderous dictators (“Malice in the Palace”), gets anal about guests taking their shoes off in his new crib (“Still Grinding”), and threatens 13-year-old snitches—then hunts down Justin Bieber to get his lean back (“Listen to me”). These moments and others, which oscillate between hilarious and stomach-churning, get at the core of what makes Veeze so fun to listen to—and often arrive in long stretches that feel more like sprawling radio freestyles than standard verses, as if he realizes that he must dig deep to keep the listener’s attention. Conversely, that wicked, unwieldy excitement is what causes a more traditionally structured cut like “BirdMan,” where imaginative verses are cut off by hooks and post-choruses, to feel flat and almost restrained.
Final track “Lose it all today,” the closest Veeze gets to an elegy, is the spiritual core of Y’all Won. He moves restlessly atop the serene R&B crooning of the sample, musing about loneliness, boasting that he “got so big that they backstab can’t kill me,” and admitting that he’s got to sleep just to sober up. The third verse is especially tender, shouting out the hood and people who loved him along the way: “Always givin’ back, I just don’t wanna do it publicly/Shoutout lil’ bruh, smarter than I’ll ever be,” he raps amid a slew of gracious bars, almost doing a supercharged version of Ghostface Killah’s “All That I Got Is You.” The fact that this leak was pulled back from the online ether by Veeze increases its emotional gravity—and calls to mind the final scene of Diva, when the singer hears her performance on tape for the first time and embraces the postman who returned the purloined recording. One can picture a similar relief for Veeze, wresting control from the internet, letting his unfazed facade crack even if for just a moment.
